The end of the set found us perspiring and happy.
And so the evening wore on. Ole and Olga joined the dancers in the third set, and thereafter never left the floor; Andy Smith ventured into Marjorie's arms, and in five minutes was feeling younger than in the days of his apprenticeship on the Clyde; Spoof danced with Jean as much as seemed necessary. When Spoof was not monopolizing her, Burke or Brown or Smith was. But at length she spurned us all in order that she might win Mr. Sneezit to the floor. The Russian hesitated, fearing to appear foolish, but he would have been more or less than human if he could have resisted Jean's enticements, and presently she was leading him through the simple movements of a cotillion.
Then it was that the minister distinguished himself. He had kept aloof from the dancing, but now, seeing Mrs. Sneezit being left somewhat out of the party, his Christianity overcame his creed and, sweeping down upon her, he seized her in his strong arms and had her upon her feet before she knew it. Her protestations were of no avail; she must dance with him and dance she did. The music and the kindness and the humanity of it all seemed to penetrate her stolid heart, and Mrs. Sneezit—she of the brood with the peering eyes and the wistful, hungry mouths—was won by the magic of fiddle and foot back into the gay days of girlhood and danced as though the world were hers.
At length they went. The flurries of snow had driven by; the moon poured its silver radiance on a world of downy ivory, and the bigger stars blinked stolidly from a steel-blue heaven as our guests bundled themselves into jumpers and sleighs and took their departure. Their cries of good wishes and good luck were wafted back to us above the crunching of the snow. We watched them until they faded out of sight in the white moonlight.
Soon after Jack and Marjorie and Jean crossed the snow-filled valley to their over-crowded house, and left me to one that was over-empty. For a long time I stood looking into the stove, with lid and lifter in my hand, in the act of putting on more wood. The glow of the coals went grey as I watched, and, for the first time in my life, I measured the depth to which the plummet of loneliness can plunge. . . .
CHAPTER XIX.
The gulf of loneliness into which I fell on the night of Marjorie's marriage was but the shallow waters of an ocean of despair in which I floundered through the dreary days that followed. I now had occasion to realize that loneliness is not a matter of space or distances, of the many or of the few, but a matter of one's adjustment toward his surroundings. In all the months of my life on Fourteen the devils of loneliness had never wormed into my vitals; my hours had been as full of companionship as though I had shared them with the throngs of some great city. I had not found the prairies lonely; I had wasted no sighs on the horizon that met the sky as far as the eye could bridge; I had been filled and content with the life that lay about me.
Now, all was changed. I had given Jean up, under protest, as the only thing to do. But having made my protest I meant to accept my fate with dignity; I would take my sentence like a man, and serve it without whining. In my fortitude I would, perhaps, present to Jean a more heroic picture than in the days of my seeming success; my bearing as a rejected suitor would have in it a touch of nobility—stern nobility, if you like—for which there was little place in the character of an accepted and happy lover. And because women love the heroic my demeanor might reveal to Jean golden threads spun through my temperament which otherwise she would not have perceived, until at last she would turn to me with "Frank, I did not realize how much a man you are! Let us start over again—at the beginning."
I flattered myself with all this nonsense about the fine figure I would cut, but that was before Marjorie had crossed to Twenty-two and my house had been left to me desolate; utterly desolate. As the grey light of the late morning of that first day after Christmas filtered through the frosted window-panes, slowly revealing the outlines of the table and the stove and the other pieces of my rude furniture, I began to realize how utterly empty and barren the wretched place was. While Marjorie had been there she had given it a soul, and Jean, dropping in every day, had added a quality that was even more than soul; it had in it something that was spiritual, that was celestial, that was divine. But now soul and spirit were gone and I was left amid the damp, drab clay.
I had been long in going to sleep, and as a consequence had awakened late. The shack was bitterly cold; the only comfort lay under my heavy blankets. As the light increased I counted the knobs of frost that had formed on the ends of the nails that came through the roof. I had never noticed that so many nails had missed the rafters. We were rather bad carpenters. My mind leapt back to the time when we built the shack, clearing all the events crowded between, as the vision leaps from height to height across great valleys in the prairies. How unreal and far away it all seemed! But another leap carried me to the bank of a river, and little children playing in the sand, and a slow-pacing water wheel that sprayed its mist of diamonds in the sunshine. I saw her little calico dress, her little brown bare feet, the ringlets of yellow hair hung about her cheeks. That was Jean. . . .